Some syntactic parallels between nominal and phrasal constructions

Abstract

In this presentation I describe some syntactic parallels between nominals and clauses, establishing also some semantic similarities between the two domains, trying to answer, from the point of view of European Portuguese, to two main questions: have nominals sentential properties? Have clauses nominal properties? As the category ‘sentence’ / ‘clause’ may be considered as TP and CP, I explore parallelisms between DP and TP and between DP and CP. In the final part I show that, in European Portuguese, at least, nominalization of clauses may give reasons to establish again parallels between DP and TP and between DP and CP. The framework is the one of Principles and Parameters Theory, but, in certain aspects, Distributed Morphology will be adopted.